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TIME - Man of the Year
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CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso
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1992-08-28
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73 lines
BEST OF 1991, Page 66
Wars rage around the the globe. A vast, tragic empire
collapses. The economy constricts painfully. But ordinary life
-- and extraordinary life -- goes on. People still write
novels and environmental treaties, design solar cells and stage
sets, orchestrate symphonies and ad campaigns. They still care
about tossing a salad or a baseball superbly. From science to
show biz, they exert all the passion, wit, ingenuity, game
playing -- and, yes, the ego, venality and damn-fool silliness
-- that keep the human enterprise steaming along so
entertainingly.
And at the end of the year we feel compelled to sort it
all out. Why? To impose order on the culture jumble, perhaps to
restore a reassuringly human scale: when Warren Beatty
represents a peak and Geraldo Rivera the pits, the concepts of
triumph and disaster have been safely domesticated. And, of
course, to play the parlor game. (The Simpsons better than
thirtysomething? Come on!)
Some of the personalities and achievements singled out in
the following pages will prove to be stars who shine only to be
eclipsed, records that stand only to be broken. Many others will
soon be swept into history's Dumpsters, as used up as New Year's
confetti. A few -- we can't know which -- will turn out to
matter, and to last. Whether by typifying 1991 or by
transcending it, whether by embodying some great theme of the
day or by quietly capturing the everyday, they will reverberate
as long as, maybe longer than, the dramatic headlines now
shouting at us. They will be, in Ezra Pound's phrase, news that
stays news.